A Blacklist for Useless Pitches

I'm beginning to come around to the argument from various bloggers who hate indiscriminate pitches. The vitriolic outpourings of anger have seemed out of proportion to the offense. But we are talking about bloggers whose inboxes get choked with inane e-mails that are either irrelevant to the person's area of interest, or so poorly handled that they enrage rather than intrigue the recipient.

<>

In response to a call for a pitch blacklist by tech blogger Jeremy Zawodny, Shel Holtz argues that as a profession, public relations practitioners should respond to the growing number of complaints:

... We have to do something about cleaning our own house. We have tolerated the worst practices of public relations long enough. Enough bad PR from the highly visible minority of practitioners who engage in it will result in more blacklists, more reporters who dismiss agencies and turn to alternate sources. Without any influence, why would clients hire agencies?

He calls for an effort from professional associations to encourage the worst offenders to clean up their act, and to educate others to adopt best practices.  He also suggests a PR bloggers association. I don't know about that one. It wouldn't resolve the problem of pitches that come from people who aren't bloggers.

Still, I like the idea of some action, rather than standing around wondering why bloggers are getting increasingly annoyed and enraged by the pitch spam they receive.

Zawodny's idea of creating a blacklist for pitch spammers will probably pick up steam, since there likely be more pitches in the future, not fewer.

Of course, every time a blogger writes "I just received an e-mail about a great product..." they are encouraging the kind of behaviour they say they detest.

Comments

[Robert French]

Good take on the squabble, Eric.

You're right. Shel's right. However, how many of us really expect the professional associations to jump on this? How well have the responded to transparency issues? Not well, in my opinion.

Still, they should.

[Eric Eggertson]

Robert:

I also think there's a lot of education that can take place, so the people doing the complaining have a better idea of how people are finding their name and e-mail address, how to indicate preferences for information received, and how to share info about the worst offenders.

I'm not holding my breath for IABC or PRSA/CPRS to take a hardline stance on something like this.

I still think a lot of the complainers are overstating the problem, but such is life.